5 Essential Items for Your Retreat Chef Bag

So, you have arrived on retreat and discover that the venue only supplies 5 dishwasher tablets for the weekend or 2 tea towels? Not ideal when catering for 16 people over 3 days. At best this will involve an extra trip to the shops to stock up, at worst a whole lot of washing up by hand and running the towels through the wash constantly.

What can you do about this? Be prepared! Obviously, you can’t necessarily pre-empt every situation, circumstance or missing item but here is a list of the top 5 things you can bring along to make your life in any kitchen a bit easier:

1. Dishwasher tablets. Bring a small bag of dishwasher tablets as a backup in case the venue hasn’t provided enough (even better, you could check beforehand what they supply in terms of cleaning materials, so that you are not caught short).
2. A small stack of clean tea towels. Easy to slip into your luggage and a life saver for all your drying needs (and great to cover dishes of food before serving).
3. A good vegetable peeler. Because there is not much worse than trying to prepare a large amount of vegetables with the most blunt peeler on the planet.
4. Your own knives. Yes, venues often provide knifes and some are astonishingly good but more often than not they are in the same category as the above-mentioned blunt peeler but more dangerous.
5. A small electric blender. Great for whizzing up sauces, pesto and even hummus, a small but powerful blender is a great tool to bring along. Many venues don’t provide electrical items like this because of the risk of breakages and cost involved in replacing these (and the annoyance of people not telling them about the item being broken – naughty!), so popping yours into your bag could definitely be a huge plus.

No doubt there are other items individual chefs simply can’t live without in their retreat kitchen – what are your essentials? Let us know in the comments.